The Infatuations

by Javier Marías

  Díaz-Varela closed the slender volume and kept the brief silence appropriate to any ending. He didn’t look at me, but remained with his eyes fixed on the cover, as if unable to decide whether to reopen the book and resume his reading. I couldn’t resist asking about the Colonel again.

  ‘And what happened to Chabert? Nothing good, I imagine, given such a pessimistic conclusion. But it offers a very partial view of things, as the character himself admits: the view of one of the three kinds of men who cannot think well of the world; the view, according to him, of the unhappiest of the three. Fortunately, there are plenty of other viewpoints, most of which are quite different from that of priests, doctors and lawyers.’

  But he didn’t respond. In fact, my initial impression was that he hadn’t even heard me.

  ‘And that’s how the story ends,’ he said. ‘Well, almost. Balzac has Godeschal give an entirely irrelevant response, which very nearly cancels out the force of that vision; but it’s a minor defect. The novel was written in 1832, one hundred and eighty years ago, although, strangely enough, Balzac places the conversation between the veteran and the novice lawyer in 1840, that is, at a point in the future, a date when he couldn’t even be sure he would still be alive, as if he knew, absolutely, that nothing would change, not just in the next eight years, but ever. If that was his intention, then he was quite right. It’s not just that things are exactly the same now as they were when he was describing them – well, the same, if not worse, ask any lawyer. It’s always been like that. Far more crimes go unpunished than punished, not to speak of those we know nothing about or that remain hidden, for there must inevitably be more hidden crimes than crimes that are known about and recorded. It’s only natural really that Balzac should leave it to Derville rather than to Chabert to speak of the horrors of the world. After all, a soldier tends to play relatively fair, it’s clear what he’s there to do, he doesn’t betray or deceive and he acts not just in obedience to orders, but out of necessity: it’s either his life or that of the enemy who is equally intent on taking his or, rather, who finds himself in exactly the same dilemma. The soldier doesn’t usually act on his own initiative, he doesn’t harbour feelings of hatred or resentment or jealousy, he isn’t motivated by long-held desires or personal ambition; the only motivating force is a vague, rhetorical, empty patriotism, for those soldiers, that is, who are moved by such feelings or allow themselves to be convinced: that happened in Napoleon’s day, but not so much now, because that kind of man no longer exists, at least not in countries like ours with our armies of mercenaries. The carnage of wars is horrific, of course, but those who take part in them are only following orders, they don’t plan the wars, the wars aren’t even entirely planned by the generals or the politicians, who have an increasingly abstract and unreal vision of those bloodbaths and, needless to say, are never present, now less than ever; it’s as if they were dispatching toy soldiers to the front or on a bombing mission, toys whose faces they never see, as though they were simply immersed in some video game. Crimes committed in ordinary life, however, send shudders down the spine, fill you with fear, not so much the crimes in themselves, which are less striking and more scattered, more spaced out, one here, another there; and because they only trickle into our consciousness, they cause less outrage and tend not to provoke waves of protest however incessantly they occur. No, it’s what the crimes themselves mean that’s frightening. They always involve an individual will and a personal motive, each crime is conceived and planned by a single mind, or a few minds if it’s some kind of conspiracy; and given all the crimes that have been and still are being committed, those many different crimes, separated from each other by kilometres or years or centuries, could not, therefore, have been the product of mutual contagion; and that, in a sense, is more discouraging than a massive act of carnage ordered by a single man, a single mind, which we will always consider to be an unfortunate and inhuman exception: the kind of mind that declares an unjust, all-out war or sets in motion a cruel persecution or institutes a programme of extermination or unleashes a jihad. But however atrocious, that isn’t the worst thing, or only in quantitative terms. The worst thing is that so many disparate individuals in every age and every country – each on his own account and at his own risk, each with his own thoughts and particular, untransferable aims – should all choose the same methods of robbery, deception, murder or betrayal against the friends, colleagues, brothers, sisters, parents, children, husbands, wives, or lovers of whom they now wish to dispose, and who were doubtless the very people whom they once loved most, for whom, at another time, they would have given their life or killed anyone who threatened them, indeed, it’s possible that they would have confronted themselves had they been able to see themselves in the future as they prepare, without remorse or hesitation, to unleash upon their former loved one the fatal blow. That’s what Derville was talking about: “We see the same wicked feelings repeated over and over, and nothing can correct them, our offices are sewers that can never be washed clean. I cannot begin to tell you the things I have seen in the exercise of my profession … ”’ – This time, Díaz-Varela quoted from memory and stopped, perhaps because he couldn’t remember any more, perhaps because there was no point in going on. He looked again at the cover, which featured a portrait, possibly by Géricault, of a hussar with a long, curled moustache and a helmet; and he added, as if finally tearing himself away from that abstracted gaze and emerging from a daydream: ‘Apparently, it’s a very famous novel, although I’d never heard of it before. They’ve even made three films of it, imagine that.’

  When someone is in love, or, more precisely, when a woman is in love and in the early stages of an affair, when it still has all the allure of the new and surprising, she is usually capable of taking an interest in anything that the object of her love is interested in or speaks about. She’s not just pretending as a way of pleasing him or winning him over or establishing a fragile stronghold, although there is an element of that, she really does pay attention and allow herself to be genuinely caught up in what he feels and transmits, be it enthusiasm, aversion, sympathy, fear, anxiety or even obsession. Not to mention accompanying him in his improvised lucubrations, which are what most bind and attract her because she is there at their birth and pushes them out into the world and watches them stretch and waver and stumble. She develops a sudden passion for things to which she had never before given a moment’s thought, she acquires unexpected dislikes, picks up on details that had previously passed her by unnoticed and that her senses would have continued to ignore until the end of her days, she focuses her energies on matters that affect her only vicariously or because she is under some sort of spell or influence, as if she had decided to live out her life on screen or on stage or inside a novel, in an alien fictional world that absorbs and amuses her more than her real life, which she puts temporarily on hold or relegates to second place, and takes a brief rest from it (there is nothing more tempting than to surrender yourself to someone else, even if only in your imagination, and to make his problems your own and to submerge yourself in his existence, which, because it is not yours, seems easier to bear). I’m possibly going too far in putting it like that, but initially we women do place ourselves at the service or at the disposal of the person we happen to love, and mostly we do this innocently, that is, not knowing that there will come a day, if we ever feel solid and established enough, when he will look at us with disappointment and perplexity as it dawns on him that, in fact, we care nothing for what once excited us, that we are bored by what he tells us, even though he hasn’t changed his topics of conversation, which are no less interesting than they used to be. It just means that we will have stopped struggling to maintain that initial e
nthusiasm and passion, but not that we were pretending or were being false from the very start. With Leopoldo there was never any crux moment, because I never felt the same wilful, ingenuous, unconditional love for him that I felt for Díaz-Varela, into whom I threw myself body and soul – albeit prudently and discreetly, so that he would barely notice – despite knowing beforehand that he could never reciprocate my love, that he, in turn, was at Luisa’s service and had, inevitably, been waiting a long time for his opportunity.

  I borrowed the Balzac novella (yes, I do know French) because he had read it to me and talked to me about it, and how could I not be interested in something that had interested him, given that I was still in that early phase of falling in love when everything about him was a revelation. I did so out of curiosity too: I wanted to know what had happened to the Colonel, although I assumed he had not met with a happy end, that he had failed to recover wife, fortune or dignity, that he might perhaps have ended up yearning for his condition as corpse. I had never read anything by Balzac, he was another famous writer who, like so many others, I hadn’t so much as glanced at, because, paradoxical though it may seem, working in a publishing house prevents you from reading almost any of the truly great literature that has been written, the literature that time has sanctioned and miraculously authorized to endure beyond that briefest of moments, which grows ever briefer. I was also intrigued to know why Díaz-Varela had found it so fascinating and spent so much time over it, why it had led him into those thoughts, why he was using it as evidence that the dead are fine where they are and should never come back, even if their death was untimely and unjust, stupid, gratuitous and unfortunate, like that of Desvern, and even if there was no risk of them ever reappearing. It was as if he feared that, were his friend to be resurrected, were such a thing possible, he wanted to convince me or convince himself that any resurrection would be inopportune, a mistake, and even bad for both the living and for the dead man, as Balzac ironically dubbed the surviving and ghostly Chabert, and that it would even cause everyone unnecessary suffering, always assuming that the truly dead can still suffer. I also had the impression that Díaz-Varela was keen to endorse and accept the lawyer Derville’s pessimistic vision, his gloomy ideas about the infinite capacity of normal individuals (like you and me) for covetousness and crime, for placing their own miserly interests before any consideration of pity, affection or even fear. It was as if he wanted to find verification for this in a novel – not in a chronicle or in the annals or in a history book – and to find there persuasive arguments to prove that this was simply how humankind always was and had been, that there was no escaping this and that one should expect only the basest of deeds, betrayals and cruelties, the broken promises and deceptions that have sprung up and been committed in every time and place with no need for examples or models to imitate, although most such crimes remain secret, covered up, and were performed surreptitiously and never came to light, not even after a hundred years had passed, when no one can be bothered to find out what happened all that time ago. And although he hadn’t said as much, it was easy to deduce that he didn’t even believe that there were many exceptions, apart, perhaps, from a few unusually innocent beings, but, rather, that any seeming exceptions could usually be attributed to a lack of imagination or boldness or possibly the physical inability to carry out a robbery or a crime, or were the product of our own ignorance, our lack of knowledge as to what people had done or planned or ordered to be done and had very successfully concealed.

  When I reached the end of the novel and the words spoken by Derville, of which Díaz-Varela had improvised a translation in Spanish, I noticed that he had made a mistake or had perhaps misunderstood, either unwittingly or, possibly, on purpose, to prove his point; perhaps he had chosen or opted to read something into the text that wasn’t there, so that his mistaken interpretation, whether deliberate or not, would reinforce what he was trying to endorse or emphasize, that is, the ruthlessness of men or, in this case, women. He had translated it thus: ‘I have seen women administer lethal drops to a legitimate child born of the marriage bed in order to bring about its death and thus benefit a love-child.’ When I heard that sentence, my blood froze, because it seems unimaginable that a mother could make such distinctions between her children, especially when those distinctions depended solely on who the father was, that she should have loved one and detested or only tolerated the other, still less that she could be capable of causing the death of the first-born in order to benefit her favourite child, by giving the former some sort of poisoned bait, perhaps in the shape of curative drops for a cough, thus taking advantage of the child’s blind faith in the person who had brought him into the world and who had fed and cared for and tended him throughout his whole existence. But that isn’t what the original said, it didn’t say: ‘J’ai vu des femmes donnant à l’enfant d’un premier lit des gouttes qui devaient amener sa mort …’, but ‘des goûts’, which doesn’t mean ‘drops’ but ‘tastes’, although you couldn’t translate it like that, because it would be ambiguous, to say the least, and lead to confusion. Díaz-Varela’s French was doubtless better than mine, he had, after all, studied at the Lycée, but I was tempted to think that a more accurate translation of what Balzac had written would be something like this: ‘I have seen women instil in a legitimate child born of the marriage bed certain tastes’ (or perhaps ‘inclinations’) ‘that would bring about its death and thus benefit a love-child.’ The meaning still wasn’t very clear even in that interpretation, nor was it easy to imagine what exactly Derville meant. To give or instil in a child tastes or inclinations that would bring about his death? Drink or opium or gambling or a tendency to criminal behaviour perhaps? A taste for luxury that he would be unable to give up and that would lead him to commit crimes in order to satisfy that taste? A morbid lust that would expose him to diseases or propel him into rape? A character so weak and fearful that the slightest setback would drive him to suicide? It was obscure and almost enigmatic. Whatever the true interpretation, what a long time it would take to produce that desired and carefully planned death, what a very slow process and what a large investment of time. And the mother’s level of perversity would be far greater than if she had simply given her child a few murderous drops disguised as something else, and which perhaps only an inquisitive, stubborn doctor would be able to detect. There is a difference between preparing someone for their early ruin and death and killing them outright, and we tend to believe that the latter is the graver and more reprehensible of the two, because we have a horror of violence and find direct intervention more shocking, or maybe it’s because there is then no room for doubts or excuses, the person carrying out or committing the act has no hiding place, and cannot say it was a mistake or an accident or a miscalculation or an error. A mother who had ruined her son’s life, who had intentionally spoiled or perverted her child, could always say, when faced by the unfortunate consequences: ‘That wasn’t what I intended at all. How stupid of me, how could I possibly have imagined that things would turn out this way? I did everything out of excessive love and with the best of intentions. I may have kept him wrapped in cotton wool for so long that I made a coward of him, I may have given in to his every whim and so twisted his mind that he turned into a despot, but my one thought was always his happiness. How blind I have been and how unthinkingly pernicious!’ And she could even come to believe this herself, whereas she couldn’t possibly think or tell herself such things if her child had died at her hands, because of something she had done and at an hour she herself had determined. Actually causing someone’s death is a very different matter, says the person not holding the weapon (and we, unwittingly, accept his reasoning), from, say, preparing the ground for i
t and waiting for it to come about or to happen of its own accord; as is desiring and ordering someone’s death, for the desire and the order sometimes become confused and can prove indistinguishable for those accustomed to having their desires satisfied as soon as they have been expressed or even implied, or to having their desires carried out as soon as they have been conceived. That is why the most powerful and most cunning of people never dirty their own hands or even their tongue, because that way they still have the option of saying, when they are at their smuggest, or when most troubled and wearied by their conscience: ‘I didn’t actually do it. Was I there, was I holding the gun, the spoon, the knife that finished him off? I wasn’t even there when he died.’